Tom’s on assignment today, so he called his most trusted fill-in host – YOU! We’ve got listener thoughts on the Amazon Fire, Facebook and Oculus, the Adobe Creative Cloud, and a genuine Molly Wood Heartbleed rant. Plus Jon Strickland has some thoughts about the (much) bigger picture.

Does hearing more about the Heartbleed vulnerability make your brain bleed? Lastpass to the rescue! The passwords storage and checker won points for fixing the vulnerability on their own site quickly and for the solid practice of encrypting traffic on another level. Now Lastpass users have a handy tool to help them decide if and when to change passwords due to heartbleed. The security checkler function in lastpass wills can all stored passwords and highlight any servers that have not patched OpenSSL 1.01 PLUS whether they’ve updated their security certificate. It’s all summarized in an action entry that either says wait, or Go update.

TechCrunch also reports Facebook is taking the messaging capability out of the standard Facebook app. That means you’ll need to download the Facebook Messenger app if you want to chat with friends on the service on your mobile device. People who already downlaoded the Messenger app might not notice since the messenger tab automatically detects the messenger app and links to it if it’s there. Facebook will roll the change out slowly, starting in Europe and notify users several times before the messaging tabs actually disappears. The change doesn’t affect users of Facebook’s Paper app.

Remember Comcast submitted their 180-page filing on why a merger with Time Warner Cable would be good? Among the many reasons Comcast pointed out they don’t compete with TWC because they have no overlapping markets. CNET reports, Senator Al Franken found that interesting. During a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the merger, Senator Franken pointed out Comcast cited competition with Time Warner Cable as a reason to approve Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal in 2010. The hearing does not have any direct influence over approval of the merger.

The Dropbox-owned mailbox app is now available for Android. Engadget reports it even has some features not found int he iOS version., including a new auto-swipe feature that teaches the app which emails you archive and defer until later and acts appropriately when it sees them. The company also showed off a preview of mailbox for the desktop.

Dropbox also made the news with the addition of Dr. Condoleeza Rice to its board of Directors. PC Magazine reports that Dropbox CEO Drew Houston made the announcement along with the news that Sujay Jaswa and Dennis Woodside have been named CFO and COO, respectively. Rice has been Provost of Stanford University, served on the board of several companies like HP and Charles Schwab, and is likely best known for serving as US Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. Rice was also National Security Advisor from 2002 until 2005. That is an advisory White House position with no authority over any departent.

habichuelcondulce submitted the Reuters report that Intel will shut its assembly and test operation in Costa Rica, eliminating 1,500 jobs. Intel spokesman Chuck Malloy said Intel will move assembly and testing from its site in Heredia, Costa Rica to existing sites in China, Malaysia and Vietnam, over the next 6 months. Intel’s R&D efforts will continue in Costa Rica, employing some 1,000 people. Intel announced in January it would reduce its worldwide workforce by 107,000 this year.

Draconos passed along the Verge report about Sesame Street launching its own streaming video service. Sesame Go is browser-based but US-only and works on Mac, Windows and mobile devices. For $4 a month or $30 a year, you can watch hundreds of Sesame Street episodes as well as the animated series Pinky Dinky Doo.

tm204 posted the ScienceDaily report about a study published in Materials Today describing computer logic units built using slime molds. The work by Andrew Adamatzky of the University of West England, and Theresa Schubert of Bauhaus University, exploited the interconnected tubes of slime molds to process information. To make the tubes work the way they wanted to, they fed tubes oat flakes where they wanted to grow them and salted areas where they didn’t want tubes. Using dyes with magnetic nanoparticles and tiny fluorescent beads, allowed them to use the slime mold network as a biological “lab-on-a-chip” device. “The slime mold based gates are non-electronic, simple and inexpensive,” according tot he study.

Michael Wolf is on the show helping me deal with the post Heartbleed vulnerability trauma we all are feeling today. Plus he’s got some good news for folks in the wearables industry. As a bonus Steve Gibson helps us understand what we should do about Heartbleed.

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

The entire Internet has been reporting on the Heartbleed vulnerability in SSL/TLS today. Heartbleed is a bug in the OpenSSL cryptographic library version 1.01 that as been in wild since 14 March 2012. The bug would allow an attacker to recover up to 64 kilobytes of memory from the server or client computer, repeatedly. OpenSSL has issued a patch which is OpenSSL 1.01g. The nasty part of the bug is it could not only allow an attacker to get things like passwords in memory if they’re lucky, but also recover primary and secondary SSL keys, which means the bad guys could impersonate the good guys and you’d never be able to tell. Many sites do not use OpenSSL and are unaffected. Apple, Google and Microsoft appear to be unaffected, along with the major e-banking services. Before you log into a sensitive service check filippo.io/Heartbleed/ to see if the site has updated to SSL 1.01g, although beware some false negatives have been reported. But if it says it’s updated it is. Then you should also check to make sure any previously vulnerable site has updated its ssl certificate which you can do at https://sslcheck.globalsign.com/ or do several of these tests at https://www.ssllabs.com/

The Verge reports Twitter profile pages are showing up with a fundamental redesign. The Twitter blog announced the change Tuesday morning saying the changes will be rolled out to select users first then globally over the next few weeks. Main changes include user and friend photos in a tile layout on the lower left, size adjustment to posts based on how popular they are and the ability to pin a tweet to the top of the page.

XP says goodbye, and 8.1 update says hello. OK XP users, this is it. The final four security updates for Windows XP and Office 2003 for Windows XP were released today. Download. Install. Enjoy. You’re on your own now. Godspeed. On the other end of the scale, Windows 8.1 Update aka 8.1 (1) or the new 8.1 or whatever arrived today.

Recode reports Comcast made their 180-page case for why the government should allow them to merge with Time Warner Cable and grab 30% of the US cable market. There’s a lot in those pages about video competition, citing Apple, Microsoft, even Facebook as big competitors to little ol’ Comcast. They don’t point out so clearly that those services all have to run over pipes which would become dominated by Comcast. They also didn’t mention they beat Monsanto in the Consumerist’s Worst Company in America poll. This is only the beginning of the review. Tomorrow, a Senate panel will examine the deal. Justice Department officials are starting to evaluate any competitive threats and the FCC plans to focus on whether it’s in the public interest.

Like Microsoft Office on your iPAd? Thank Steve Ballmer. During a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, the Office for iPad and Mac team revealed “the decision to ship Office for iPad was made before Satya Nadella became CEO.

Iyaz Akhtar is on the show today. We’ll discuss some pretty cool flexible tech that could let you scan things by laying it on your screen. Also, we get the scoop on Android TV from The Verge’s Sean Hollister.

GigaOm reports Android lock screen app Cover said Monday it was joining Twitter. The app that launched in invite-only beta in October, replaces the Android lock screen with one that suggests apps based on location. The current Cover app will remain in the Google Play store for now, but the development team will be working on things for Twitter.

GigaOm reports two new chips from Qualcomm were announced Monday. The Snapdragon 808 and 810 support 64-bit computing, support LTE-Advanced wireless speeds up to 300 Mbps and dual-stream 82.11ac WiFi. The 810 also gets 4K video support. Apple has 64-bit support in its A7, and Intel has a 64-bit Android Kernel, but Android does not have an official 64-bit version yet. Google I/O is coming up end of June though. The new Qualcomm chips will become available in commercial devices in the first 6 months of 2015.

Microsoft introduced a new version of Skype for broadcasters Monday morning, called Skype TX. The “studio-grade” version has high-quality audio and video without unnecessary features like call notifications and ads. Skype TX comes with HD-SDI video output and input, balanced audio output and input, auto aspect ration conversion, support for multiple, simultaneous calls, operator previews, and more. Media organizations can sign up at media.skype.com/skype-tx but no other details on pricing or shipping were announced.

The Verge reports M3D launched a Kickstarter today to bring a new consumer 3D printer called Micro. The Micro accepts PLA and ABS plastics as well the company’s own Micro filament spools. The company also claims it has made much more intuitive software. M3D hopes to have assembly line production rolling between August and September for delivery starting in March next year. The printer costs only $249 but you’ll have to back at $899 if you want one from the first batch. The $50,000 was reached in minutes and in the first day, M3D has raised almost a half a million.

News From You:

Our top vote-getter on the subreddit was submitted by KAPT_Kipper. The TechCrunch story relates the protest that took place against Kevin Rose outside his apartment in San Francisco. Rose, the co-founder of Digg and Revision3, works for Google Ventures now. Protestors targeted Rose because he is a venture capitalist and because of controversial things he said on the show DiggNation in the past. The group demands Google give $3 billion to an anarchist organization to create autonomous, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist communities throughout the bay area and northern California.

cincyhuffster posted the Verge article about the Amazon Dash, a 6-inch long plastic stick that lets customers of the Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service, add items to their shopping list either by voice command or scanning an item itself. Shoppers then have those items already queued up the next time they need to place an order.

Darren Kitchen is here to talk about the 5-year-old who hacked an Xbox One and started a career in security research. Plus, a look at the Amazon Fire TV in use. AND Len Peralta is here to illustrate the episode.

Graphene, a substance poised to take over for silicon for many years, may finally made it out of the lab. CNET reports Samsung’s researchers have synthesized a crystal of graphene that retains its charge across a larger area, which could lead to industrial scale production. Graphene is just one atom thick, more conductive than silicon, stronger than steel and able to leap tall buildings if carried by Superman. It could make it easier to construct flexible or unbreakable screens and be useful in things like bionic implants.

Josh Constine at TechCrunch has a piece up, looking at the question of Facebook’s declining page reach. Even though the total number of pages liked on Facebook grew 50% last year, companies like Eat24 and presumed people like Rainn Wilson have complained and even broken up with Facebook over a declining number of people visiting their pages. A study from News Feed optimization service EdgeRank Checker has found reach per fan has steadily declined. Constine finds the increase in things for people on Facebook to pay attention to, plus the number of alternatives like Twitter and Pinterest are the most likely culprits.

SpSheridan let us know that Nest has announced it halted sales of the Nest Protect smoke alarm, after it found that the Nest Wave feature could delay the alarm from going off during a fire. Nest Wave let a user wave hands at the detector to shut off the alarm. Nets researchers found this feature could be unintentionally activated. Protect smoke detectors that have already been sold will automatically update and deactivate the feature within 24 hours if the device is connected to the Internet. Nest is also offering refunds. It may take up to three months to get regulatory approval of changes to the software for Nest Protects to be sold again.

metalfreak pointed out the Network World story that Linus Torvalds has banned Kay Sievers, a prominent Red Hat employee and code contributor, from working on the Linux Kernel. Sievers develops the system management framework systemd. Torvalds banned Sievers for failing to address an issue that caused systemd to interact with the Linux kernel in negative ways. The command line entry of debug would run both the base kernel and systemd’s debugging routines potentially flooding some systems. Torvalds wrote on a mailing list that he is “tired of the fact that you don’t fix problems in the code *you* write.” referring to Sievers.

And motang pointed out the ReactOS Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign. – ReactOS is a free open source operating system based on the design principles of the Windows NT architecture. It is intended to be binary compatible with Windows software. The group wants to raise $50,000 to help develop a ReactOS community edition, which will focus on developing compatibility with the community’s favorite Windows apps and drivers, based on a vote.

If you like to make coffee at home, but you’re still using good old reliable Mr. Coffee with good old reliable pre-ground coffee, perhaps its time for an upgrade? Today’s pick of the day: A Capresso 560.01 Infinity Burr Grinder. Grinding your own beans ups your coffee quality by at least 50%. Using a conical burr grinder instead of the traditional two-blade grinder produces a uniform grind by only allowing grains of a specific size to pass through the machine, among other benefits. Amazon has them for about eighty bucks, which is NOT cheap, but it’s worth the investment. Now you can all fight among yourselves about which method of coffee preparation is the best. Jennie choses a Chemex brewer, but that’s another story for another pick of the day.

Europe is free to roam, and guaranteed neutral. The BBC reports the European Parliament voted 534 to 25 in favor of a package of telecom reforms called Connected Continent, championed by EC Vice President Neelie Kroes. Among other things, the new regulations would get rid of roaming fees as of December 15th 2015. The package also included provisions protecting Net Neutrality and making it easier to build networking infrastructure. EU member states now must review and approve the regulations. The Commission expects final agreement by the end of the year.

Apple announced the dates for this years WorldWide Developers Conference at the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco. The highly-anticipated show will run from June 2 until June 6. Ars Technica reports tickets will be issued at random to any registered developer who signs up at Apple’s site by Monday April 7 at 10 AM Pacific Time. If selected, you get to spend $1,599 on a ticket by April 14th, or lose your spot. Tickets cannot be resold or given away.

Recode reports Mozilla confirmed in a blog post that CEO Brendan Eich is resigning from his position and from the Mozilla foundation board. Eich had contributed to a campaign to make gay marriage illegal in California. Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker told Recode that Eich’s ability to lead the company had been damaged by the continued scrutiny over the hot-button issue. The blog post from Mozilla stated “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.”

MrAnthropology submitted the CNET story about Intel’s new 24-nanometer ‘Braswell’ system-on-a-chip unveiled at IDF in China. Braswell will follow in the footsteps of the Bay Trail chip used in low-cost PCs like Chromebooks. Intel also unveiled a 64-bit Android 4.4 KitKat kernel optimized for Intel Architecture devices. As well as a media box from QVOD running on a Bay Trail chip, arriving later this year. Oh and Intel is working with Xiaomi on a Widi-enabled set-top box.

LifeDownloaded passed along the AP story about the US Agency for International Development, AKA USAID, secretly developing a microblogging system over text messaging in Cuba called ZunZuneo, which is slang for the sound a hummingbird makes. Documents show the US planned to build up users through non-controversial content, then try to get things to turn political. At its peak the company had 40,000 users. When USAID felt it could no longer hid its involvement, they tried to find new managers, then eventually the service shut down in 2012.

My favorite tool is a website that helps me find my favorite tools It is called alternativeto.net

When you have questions such as “Is there a tool like WinZip on the Mac?”, “What was the name of that free program that works like Photoshop?” or “Is everyone still using ACDSee?”, then you can enter the name of the tool you have in mind, and the website will list all similar programs by popularity. You can also narrow the search by platform or by license type (free, open source, or commercial). I use both Mac and Windows and this site helped me populate my machines with nice tools.

Amazon’s Peter Larsen announced the Amazon Fire TV in a press conference in New York Wednesday morning. The .7” think CD-case-sized box is another video streamer but packs in a quad-core processor, dedicated GPU, 2GB of RAM and dual-band WiFi with Mimi. The remote control connects by Bluetooth and takes voice commands. IN addition to the usual apps like Netflix and Hulu, the device also plays games from major publishers, albeit games that play well on the underlying Android-based operating system. Amazon also announced a game controller for the Fire TV that costs $39.99 and comes with 1000 Amazon Coins and a free game from Amazon. The FireTV box itself sells for $99 and is available to order int he US, shipping today.

Get ready for three hours of Microsoft announcements? Don’t fret, we compressed them into a few minutes. But still. There’s a lot of them. Let’s start with Windows Phone 8.1. It sports a new action center, new lock screen experiences, a new way to set the background on start screen, and the big hit, MS personal assistant software, Cortana. The voice-activated assistant replaces the phone OS’s search function. It also shows you a notebook with what it knows about you. 8.1 also supports enterprise level VPN, new MDM capabilities and S/MIME encrypted email. Oh and a nifty WiFi Sense feature that joins known hotspots faster and a nifty keyboard typing function called ‘shape writing” that’s similar to Swype on Android. 8.1 will roll out to current customers of WP8 in the next few months. Brand new phones will have it as soon as late April, or early May.

A couple of those new phones were announced by Nokia’s soon to be Microsoft’s Stephen Elop. The Lumia 930 will have a 5-inch full HD display, integrated wireless charging, a 20 MP PureView sensor with Optical Image Stabilization and Zeiss optics and 4 microphones for audio capture in video. Lumia 930 sales start in June overseas for around $599. Elop also announced the Lumia 630 and 635 with a 4-inch display, five colors with shells. The 630 comes with 3G dual SIM capabilities while the 635 has LTE. Both phones come with a low-powere Sensorcore processor that can track movement for things like fitness tracking. Sales start next month in Asia. The U.S. will see them in July. The phones will run about $159 for the single SIM 630; $10 more for dual SIM. $189 for the Lumia 635.

Finally, Microsoft gave us a peek at the future, including the holy grail of universal apps. Universal Windows apps makes the Windows runtime available for phones for common code, providing a consistent user experience across devices including the Xbox. IN addition DirectX 12 will be the shared platform for Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox. Universal Windows Apps will run in their own Window on the Desktop, new for Modern apps. No more jarring experience between Desktop and Metro/Modern. And Microsoft is getting more open. Windows Library for javascript is going cross-platform and open source. And Windows for IoT will be free as will Windows for phones and tablets with screens less than 9 inches. Oh and next update will bring the Start menu back, with new added live tiles alongside a more familiar looking list.

And now for some not-Microsoft news! Samsung launched a service called “Samsung Smart Home” in the US and Korea Wednesday. An Android app is now available that will give users the ability to manage compatible devices from Samsung and other manufacturers. In the US the system is compatible at launch with the “Samsung Smart French Door Refrigerator” and the “Samsung Smart Front Loading Washing Machine.” An app is in the works for the Gear 2 and 2014 Samsung Smart TVs as well.

cosmicvibes submitted the blog post from Canonical’s Jane Silber announcing the shutdown of Ubuntu One cloud file storage services. The post says Ubuntu could not compete with services offering 25-50GB of free storage. The Ubuntu One file services will not be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release. The current services will be unavailable from 1 June 2014; user content will remain available for download until 31 July, at which time it will be deleted. Customers with annual subscriptions will have the unused portion refunded.

melchizedek74 pointed out the Verge article about an FCC Spokesperson telling the National Journal, “Peering and interconnection are not under consideration in the Open Internet proceeding.” Although the agency is monitoring the situation and considering some new rules to regulat arrangements between companies like Comcast and Netflix. So totally off the table in net neutrality talks. But maybe they’ll regulate it anyway? You’re confusing us FCC!

And KAPT_Kipper, he gets a twofer today, sent in the link to the Ars Technica article about Google taking its WiFi sniffing case to the US Supreme Court. Back in 2010 Google’s Street View cars were using MAC addresses of WiFi connections to help pin down locations better. Lots of services including your phone do this. Google got caught sniffing in some packets from open WiFi connections that were not necessary for the location info, including pieces of email data etc. Google says that was an accident. In 2012, the FCC fined Google $25,000 for stonewalling its investigation and a US Federal Appeals Court concluded the collection violated the Wiretap Act. Google has appealed the devision and has now asked the US Supreme Court to review it.

“Il parle sans savoir et sans comprendre”* Or, according to the addictive language-learning app Duolingo, “He is talking without knowing and without understanding.” This free app can teach you to say that in six languages – Spanish, French, German, Italian, English and Portuguese. The app was crowned Apple’s App of the Year in 2013 and it’s worth every free penny. Unlike Spanish 101, you don’t have to get up for class at 8am, you don’t have to remember to answer to your “Spanish name,” and best of all, it’s actually FUN. If languages really aren’t your forte, at the very least, it’s a source of unintentional giggles when asking you to translate phrases, like “Erwachsenen haben diese Traume,”* or, “No normal adults have these dreams.” (H/T to the wtfduolingo tumblr for finding the app’s sometimes awkward awesomeness.)

Today is April 1st. April Fools’ day which the Internet first made amazing and then risked ruining. How did the Internet do this year? Google Japan gave us a robot hand you can use to type. Google+ introduce auto awesome photobomb which inserted David Hasselhoff into your pictures. Richard Branson played along with Nest for flights, giving Virgin airline passengers climate control. YouTube decided to stop producing the memes and let people do it this year. And SwiftKey for physical keyboards, Roku Watch, Samsung, Toshiba, AND HTcC’s smart gloves, CERN changing to comic sans as the official typeface, Sphero’s selfiebot, iFixit bought by Apple, AND the inevitable raft of awesome, possibly soon to be real fake products from ThinkGeek.

Reuters reports that researchers found another vulnerability insecurity company RSA’s random number generator. Reports in December indicated the NSA paid RSA $10 million and that the NSA had implemented a back door into RSA’s Dual Elliptic Curve random number generator. Now professors from Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois and elsewhere have discovered that an extension called “Extended Random” could be exploited as a vulnerability. Extended Random was touted as a way to boost randomness but makes predicting secure numbers easier according to the researchers. RSA continues to maintain it has not intentionally weakened any of its products.

The Washington Post reported jury selection began Monday in the latest court battle between Apple and Samsung. Apple accuses Samsung of infringing five patents on newer devices, including tap-from-search that makes things like phone numbers into links as well as slide to unlock. In a counterclaim, Samsung says Apple infringes its wireless technology system that speeds up sending and receiving data on iPhones and iPads.

Reuters reports the European Parliament will vote on the Net Neutrality recommendations at noon on Thursday. The current proposal, put forward by Socialist and Green party MEPs, says: “(Specialised) services shall only be offered if the network capacity is sufficient to provide them in addition to Internet access services and they are not to the detriment of the availability or quality of Internet access services.” The proposals need approval by the EU’s 28 governments before they can become law. Only the Netherlands and Slovenia have net neutrality legislation already in place.

spsheridan pointed out the Ars Technica article about the US Supreme Court hearing oral arguments today in the case of Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank. Four patents at issue describe software that performs trusted financial exchanges. Nobody, except maybe Alice Corp. expects the Supreme Court to rule the patents are valid. The importance of the case revolves around the reasoning the court gives. The Court could rule that software itself doesn’t qualify for patent protection. Companies that favor software patents, like Microsoft, Adobe and IBM, have filed briefs recommending the court invalidate the Alice patents very narrowly without impacting software patents in general. Other companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp, Newegg, Netflix and Rackspace have filed a brief asking the court to make it much harder to get software patents. Unsurprisingly the justices’ line of questioning today indicated they are likely to invalidate the Alice patents but eliminate the legal basis of software patents altogether.

Galcyon sent in the Verge article about Google getting a jump on April Fool’s day. Maybe the schedule for this one was left up to Australians. Google has a video up advertising an augmented reality Pokemon game tied in to Google Maps. If you zoom into certain areas around the world on Google Maps today, you’ll see where the creatures are meant to appear. Yay April Fools day where news goes to die!